Updates

As part of the Tribute, Full Frame will screen Bognar and Reichert’s latest film, American Factory 美国工厂, winner of the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. With astonishing access, the film takes us inside a Chinese factory, opened in 2014 in a shuttered General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio, to observe what happens when the profoundly different cultures of the workers collide. American Factory is a Participant Media production. Bognar and Reichert have screened many of their…

National Endowment for the Arts Acting Chairman Mary Anne Carter has approved more than $27 million in grants as part of the Arts Endowment’s first major funding announcement for fiscal year 2019. Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $30,000 to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Art Works is the Arts Endowment’s principal grantmaking program. The agency received 1,605 Art Works applications for…

Announcement

Full Frame 2019 Thematic Program Curated by RaMell Ross

Filmmaker, photographer, and writer RaMell Ross will curate its 2019 Thematic Program. Ross’s first film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, has been described as the birth of “a new cinematic language” (Village Voice) and is nominated for the 2019 Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature.

The 2019 Thematic Program, New Lives of Time, explores poetic modes of storytelling by highlighting documentary films that offer idiosyncratic experiences—films that create space for viewers to wander their own imaginations to make connections and meaning. The series also examines how time works on screen by revealing, through a range of filmic forms, the way that passing minutes, hours, and days provide a cinematic structure and underscore deeper significance within the work.

“We are thrilled to work with RaMell Ross on this year’s Thematic Program. Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a stunning cinematic achievement, a film that establishes visual ways of communicating beyond words and pushes the boundaries of conventional storytelling,” said Full Frame Artistic Director Sadie Tillery. “In imagining this year’s series, I wanted to explore films that invite us on distinctive journeys and submerge us in the tides of time and place. It is immensely exciting to collaborate with RaMell on this idea. This year’s program allows us to reflect on the documentary form, and even the very experience of watching, through the lens of a visionary filmmaker.”

Ross has a longstanding relationship with Full Frame. In 2014, he screened a work-in-progress of Hale County This Morning, This Evening as a Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant recipient and the film later screened in competition at the 2018 festival, where it won The Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award. He returned to Durham in summer 2018 as the visiting filmmaker for Full Frame’s School of Doc, a free filmmaking camp for public high school students that is supported by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.